7th Annual Meeting of the Young Academy of Europe, 2018: an update from the Board

The new YAE Board, taken at the Barcelona AGM, November 2018 (Lydia Schumacher and Kate Black not present)
The new YAE Board, taken at the Barcelona AGM, November 2018 (Lydia Schumacher and Kate Black not present)

Message from the Chair

“I am very excited to have been elected as the Chair at our recent AGM in Barcelona. It was a pleasure to meet so many of you there, and I have big plans for the coming year. Some areas I would like to focus on are:

Communication

We need better communication within the YAE, and between the YAE and other organisations such as other Academies, and also European-level organisations. We have some ideas here, but please do contact us with your suggestions.

Changes in the Board

Marcel Swart, our previous Chair, has worked very hard in the last years. Together with the Board and other members, he has established strong connections between the YAE and the Academia Europaea, organisations such as SAPEA and EuroDoc, has pushed for the YAE to be registered as a charity, and managed countless documents and emails (I have no idea how he did this). Two other Board Members, Monica Brinzei and Karin Sigloch, are stepping down. Monica has joined the Academia Europaea, together with Yan Lavallee and other YAE members. We have two new Board members, Gemma Modinos and Zeila Zanolli.

Remember – you do not need to be on the Board to participate. All members represent the YAE, and your input is valued.

Best wishes for the holiday season, and a wonderful year ahead!”

Dr Mangala Srivinas, Chair of the Young Academy of Europe

Message from the Vice-Chair

“I am also very pleased to be elected Vice-Chair, and look forward to working with the Board to further improve and expand the YAE. One component of this is the survey we conducted of our membership in 2018, whose first results we are able to present here. In addition, open access issues have become very important in Europe with the advent of Plan S and its implementation guidelines.

Survey

We started a survey in late January 2018, which many of you have taken. We have about 100 responses so far, so there is quite a lot of data on work load, stress, tenure track requirements and so on. Please check out the very preliminary overview analysis that I presented at the Annual General Meeting, but be aware that there is a lot more that can be learned from the responses. Can you help with further analyses? If it falls within your expertise, please let us know!

Plan S

Academic publishing is undergoing big changes with coordinated action by the European Commission and the cOAlitionS of national funders aiming to achieve immediate open access to the results of publicly funded research starting from 2020. More funders are supporting the initiative, now including also The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in the USA and several funders in China, and it seems certain that real change is finally happening. In September, the YAE made a joint statement on the plan’s principles with Eurodoc and the Marie Curie alumni association, and we are working on a new statement on the implementation guidelines. We will be circulating a draft with our members in early January and would love to hear your views.”

Dr Toma Susi, Vice-Chair of the Young Academy of Europe

Message from the Outgoing Chair

“After almost two years my term as Chair has now ended, and Mangala is now taking over as Chair after having served as Vice-Chair during that same two years, which means she is well prepared for the job. I will stay on the YAE Board for one more year as Outgoing Chair, mainly in an advisory role and where needed helping the new Chair.

Apart from the expansion of the membership in these past two years (we’re now close to 230 FYAE fellows); the participation in the Science Advice for Policy by European Academies (SAPEA) and acting as portal to the European National Young Academies for it (more topics and news to come about SAPEA shortly); having successfully nominated our former Chair Nicole Grobert for the European Commission’s Group of Chief Scientific Advisors; helping shape the future of European research for young scholars through helping shaping Plan S; the most impactful event for the YAE in these past two years has been the unexpected passing away of our Founding Chair André Mischke. It is for this reason that the YAE Board, YAE Advisory Council and the AGM in Barcelona decided that the annual prize will be renamed to the André Mischke YAE Prize on Science and Policy, to be awarded for the first time at the next AGM in Barcelona (23-24 October 2019).”

Dr Marcel Swart, Outgoing Chair of the Young Academy of Europe

 

3rd February 2019. For further information please contact info@yacadeuro.org

Joint Statement on Implementation Guidance for Plan S

Plan S is an initiative by cOAlition S to achieve full and immediate Open Access to scientific publications after 01 January 2020 in Europe. At the heart of the plan are 10 principles currently being developed into a set of implementation guidelines. We, representatives of early-career and senior researchers across Europe, have already commented on Plan S and hereby reaffirm our general support and offer our views on the implementation guidance.

We commend cOAlition S for addressing initial concerns and for the open consultation on the guidance. There are now three clear routes to compliance via either author-accepted manuscripts or versions of record of publications. It is crucial, however, that cOAlition S ensures that these routes are viable through appropriate regulations, funding, and support. We reiterate three key concerns from our first statement on Plan S: disruption for doctoral dissertations should be minimised; venues with no author-facing fees and societies as well
as open infrastructures should be supported; institutions and funders should modernise their researcher evaluation and implement the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA).

(1) We agree that copyright on publications should stay with the original copyright holder
and not be transferred to publishers. The copyright holder is typically the author and/or institution, which can depend on legal requirements, but is often not explicitly stated. We encourage cOAlition S to recommend the author as copyright holder where legally possible.

(2) We agree that the licence on publications should by default be Creative Commons (CC) Attribution (BY), to maximise benefits of research for society via the right to reuse, modify, and redistribute. We also agree that Non-Commercial (NC) licences are not justifiable for publicly funded works. While Non-Derivative (ND) licences can restrict text-and-data mining (TDM) and Open Education, we disagree that they should not be allowed, because of concerns over misrepresentation and translations in the Humanities and Social Sciences. We encourage cOAlition S to allow researchers to opt out of CC BY for a CC BY-ND licence.

(3) We agree that publications should be identifiable via persistent identifiers (PIDs) and archived via long-term digital preservation programmes. Publications should use PIDs such as Digital Object Identifier (DOI) that enable versioning, and link to underlying data and code and author PIDs such as Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID). Archiving programmes should use multiple data pools and bitstream preservation such as Controlled Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe (CLOCKSS). We note that there are other valid options and encourage cOAlition S to specify the requirements for PIDs and for archiving programmes.

(4) We agree that publications should have high-quality metadata that is available under a Public Domain (CC0) licence. This includes information on the publication such as the PID, version, author, copyright holder, licence, open status, and funding as well as information on all citations in the publication. Guidelines by OpenAIRE for publication metadata and by the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) for citation metadata are ideal but there are other valid standards. We encourage cOAlition S to specify the required standards for metadata.

(5) We agree that the metadata and full text of publications should be machine-readable in
an interoperable format allowing TDM. Extensible Markup Language (XML) Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) is an ideal format but is technically challenging, and other valid formats exist such as HyperText Markup Language (HTML) or minimally Word, OpenDocument, and LaTeX. We encourage cOAlition S to specify other acceptable publication formats for TDM.

(6) We agree that publishing venues should offer high-quality peer review and register their self-archiving policy in SHERPA/RoMEO , as well as be registered in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and be transparent in their publishing costs and pricing. Peer review should follow standards set by disciplines and the Committee on Publicat ion Ethics (COPE) . We are concerned that DOAJ acting as a sole external gatekeeper could result in a single point of failure (SPOF) for identifying compliant venues. We encourage cOAlition S to
create and maintain a ‘seal of compliance’ for venues in close collaboration with DOAJ.

(7) We agree that article processing charges (APCs) should be paid or supported by cOAlition S where applicable and that there should be equitable waiver/discount policies. The ability to publish should never be constrained by the ability to pay. There should not only be clear regulations for waivers/discounts for authors in low/middle-income countries but also for authors with limited financial means. The planned independent study on publishing costs and pricing will help to determine a reasonable range and cap for APCs. We encourage cOAlition S to develop clear regulations for APCs and for waivers/discounts for authors.

(8) We agree that repositories should use an open application programming interface (API) and be registered in the Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR), as well as be continuously available and offer user support. ResourceSync is an ideal API although other valid APIs exist such as Open Archives Initiative (OAI) Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (PMH) and Object Exchange and Reuse (ORE). We disagree that repositories should have a help desk as long as they offer adequate user support. We also disagree that repositories should have automated ingest but should be free to choose how to ingest. We are concerned that OpenDOAR acting as a sole external gatekeeper could result in a SPOF for identifying compliant repositories. We encourage cOAlition S to specify acceptable APIs and to create and maintain a ‘seal of compliance’ for repositories in close collaboration with OpenDOAR.

(9) We agree with allowing transformative agreements with publishers to read and publish
publications during a time-specified transition period. This gives hybrid venues more time and researchers more options during the transition. All agreements should be transparent and be registered with the Efficiency and Standards for Article Charges (ESAC) as well as specify how the venue will transition once the agreement expires. It is currently unclear what sanctions will be imposed if a venue does not transition as agreed and whether older paywalled publications will be opened. We encourage cOAlition S to specify the sanc tions to be imposed on venues that do not transition and to address older paywalled publications.

(10) We agree with direct deposition of publications in author-designated or centralised repositories for scientific publications. We note that a compliant repository for researchers should always be available and that there is no centralised repository in Europe apart from Europe PubMed Central . We encourage cOAlition S to designate and support Zenodo as a fall-back compliant or even as a centralised European repository for publications in Plan S.

Signed by Gareth O’Neill [President European Council of Doctoral Candidates and Junior Researchers (Eurodoc) ], Matthew DiFranco [Chair Marie Curie Alumni Association (MCAA)], and Mangala Srinivas [Chair Young Academy of Europe (YAE) ] on 28 January 2019.

Contact details: Gareth O’Neill | @gtoneill | +31651003175 | gareth.oneill@eurodoc.net

Joint Statement on Implementation Guidance for Plan S (pdf)

Press Release: Researchers Respond to Implementation of Plan S

A joint response to the implementation guidance for Plan S has today been issued by three organisations representing early-career and senior researchers in Europe. The response by the European Council of Doctoral Candidates and Junior Researchers (Eurodoc), the Marie Curie Alumni Association (MCAA), and the Young Academy of Europe (YAE) offers concrete recommendations on the proposed guidance for implementing Open Access via Plan S.

Our three organisations represent a broad spectrum of researchers in Europe: Eurodoc represents 100000+ doctoral candidates and postdoctoral researchers from 29 national associations across Europe; MCAA has 10000+ members who are alumni fellows of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA); YAE consists of 200+ outstanding and recognised researchers in Europe. We all strongly support the main goals of Open Science and Plan S.

The joint response builds upon previous recommendations by our organisations on the principles of Plan S and aims to ensure its realistic implementation from the perspective of European researchers. Eurodoc President Gareth O’Neill:

“Plan S has shaken the academic community awake and created a lively discussion on Open Access publishing. cOAlition S has addressed some key concerns from researchers in the technical guidance but still leaves other issues open and sets too strict standards for the desired broad adoption of Plan S.”

The proposals on copyright and licencing are still somewhat contentious. YAE Vice-Chair Toma Susi who coordinated the response for YAE:

“Copyright licences are complicated and often misunderstood. Plan S requires an open CC BY licence which applies only to publications and is necessary for unrestricted text-and-data mining and other desired reuses. This is why it is the right choice for publicly funded research. However, humanities and social science scholars have expressed valid concerns over misrepresentation and translations with CC BY. Our recommendation is thus to allow the option of an ND licence.”

The key to the successful implementation of Plan S lies in the research evaluation system. Mattias Björnmalm who coordinated the response for MCAA:

“A crucial factor for Plan S to succeed is that funders and institutions modernise their research and researcher assessment (e.g. for grants, hiring, and promotion) and evaluate research on its own merits instead of relying on faulty metrics. Good practices already exist from many funders and institutions. We ask institutions and especially the members of cOAlition S to not only sign but to start implementing the DORA principles in their research and researcher evaluation.”

We thank all of our members who contributed to this statement and also Bob Jones, Bianca Kramer, Raman Ganguly, Ignasi Labastida i Juan, Peter Murray-Rust, Jon Tennant, and Peter Suber for critical feedback. Any errors are attributable to Eurodoc, MCAA, and YAE.

28th January 2019. For further information please contact Gareth O’Neill | @gtoneill | +31651003175 | gareth.oneill@eurodoc.net

Barta

Katalin Barta
Affiliation: University of Groningen, NL

Keywords: Sustainable catalysis, green chemistry, lignin depolymerization, lignocellulose, renewable resources and platform chemicals, bio-based products

Webpage

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Full profile:

Katalin Barta started her independent career at the Stratingh Institute for chemistry at the University of Groningen in 2013 where she was promoted to Associate Professor in 2017.

Having lived and studied in 5 European countries, she considers herself a truly European scientist. After finishing school in Slovakia, she studied chemistry at ELTE Budapest (Hungary) and was also Erasmus research student at the University of Leeds. Then she completed her PhD (2008) under the supervision of Walter Leitner in asymmetric catalysis and ligand design at RWTH-Aachen, Germany. After, she carried out postdoctoral research (2008-2010) with Peter Ford at University of California, Santa Barbara and subsequently worked as Associate Research Scientist (2010-2012) at Yale University, the Center for Green Chemistry and Engineering (New Haven, USA) with P. T. Anastas. Her post-doctoral work focused mainly on the catalysis and renewable resources, including lignin valorisation.

Combining various fields, the research interests in the Barta group are broadly in Sustainable and Green Chemistry, focusing on the development of novel homogeneous and heterogeneous catalytic strategies for the conversion of all main components of lignocellulose, utilizing Earth abundant metals.

Katalin is recipient of the ERC starting grant 2015, and the VIDI award of the NWO. She is funding member and secretary of the EuChemSoc division Green and Sustainable chemistry.

Den Hertog

Martien Den Hertog
Affiliation: Institut NÉEL, FR

Keywords: Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM), Nanotechnology, Microscopy, Nanoscopy, Materials science, Electron microscopy, Nanowires, Zinc oxide, Semiconductors; In-situ electron microscopy, Off axis electron holography, Dopant mapping

Webpage

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Full profile:

Dr. Martien den Hertog (female), CNRS researcher, obtained her MSc degree in Chemistry and Physics from the University of Utrecht (NL) in 2005 and PhD in 2009 from University Joseph Fourier in Grenoble on transmission electron microscopy of nanostructures. Since 2010 she is working as a junior researcher at the Institut Neel to develop methods to study nano-object based devices by correlation of electrical and structural properties and electrical in-situ TEM experiments. She has been coordinator of a French young researcher project (ANR project COSMOS) and has received and ERC starting grant e-See that starts in Oktober 2018.

Research Interest

Since 2010 I work at the Neel Institute in Grenoble.
I am interested in the structure properties relation of semiconducting nanowires (NWs) using transmission electron microscopy (TEM), optical spectroscopy and electron transport. The goal of my research is to develop methods to combine various characterization methods (optical and electrical) with transmission electron microscopy characterization on the same unique nanowire, and find what structural or electrical properties at the sub-nm scale determine the macroscopically measured optical and electrical properties of the nano-structure. For electrical and electro-optical characterization contacts have to be applied to the nanowire, that can also be used to bias the nanowire device in-situ in the transmission electron microscope. Observing the reaction of a device to an electrical signal with nm scale resolution is a very exiting opportunity to learn more on the device characteristics/reactions, and will allow ultimately to correlate the presence of a single impurity atom observed in TEM with electrical spectroscopy of this same single atom in a single dopant device.

Caricchi

Luca Caricchi
Affiliation: Université de Genève, CH

Keywords: Volcanology, Petrology, Physical properties of magmas, Magmatic Ore Deposits

Webpage

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Full profile:

Luca Caricchi completed his studies at the University of Perugia (Italy) and obtained his PhD at ETH Zurich (Switzerland) in 2008. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the CNRS in Orleans (France), he moved to the University of Bristol (UK) to complete a NERC postdoctoral fellowship. In 2012 he become assistant professor of Volcanology and Petrology at the Department of Earth Sciences of the University of Geneva (Switzerland) and in 2017 he was promoted to associate professor in the same department. Luca Caricchi received an ERC starting grant in 2015 and he is PI in other projects financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation. He is currently associate editor of Journal of Geophysical Research and has been selected for the Young Academy of Europe in 2018.

He is a volcanologist and petrologist combining geochemistry and various statistical approaches to understand the physical processes responsible for the generation, transport and eruption of magmas on Earth.

The target of his research group is to define the main factors controlling the recurrence rate of volcanic eruptions at regional and global scale and identify the mechanisms responsible for the formation of magmatic ore deposits.

Grand

Karina Lykke Grand
Affiliation: Aarhus University, DK

Keywords: studies of nationalism in theory, transnationalism, national museums and cultural heritage, 19th century art, politics and culture, museum marketing, cultural and political identities, and tourism.

Webpage

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Full profile:

Karina Lykke Grand (b. 1974) obtained her PhD at Aarhus University (Denmark) in 2008, and she holds a current position as associate professor at the same university. Grand has worked as a curator and consultant for many art museums with the aim of building bridges between university research and museum dissemination. She is a board member of the following institutions: The Danish Institute in Rome (Italy), Randers Art Museum (Denmark), Nordic Institute of Art (Norway), founder and director of the Danish based Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies as well as the Nordic Nineteenth-Century Research Network. She is also one of the founders of The Nordic Association for Romantic Studies including being founding editor of the periodical Romantik – Journal for the Study of Romanticisms (V&R Unipress). Grand is currently project investigator of a larger research project funded by The Danish Council for Independent Research, Humanities with the project title: Art and the Formation of National Identities.

Calma

Dragos Calma
Affiliation: University College Dublin, IE

Keywords: medieval philosophy, history of metaphysics, theories of the soul, Neoplatonism, Latin Averroism, late Albertism, intellectual history, history of libraries, history of institutions.

Webpage

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I studied philosophy at the University “Babes-Bolyai” in Cluj-Napoca, Romania (BA in 2001), at the École normale supérieure, Paris (2001-2003), at the University Panthéone-Sorbonne (MA in 2002) and University of Sorbonne (MPhil in 2003, PhD in 2008). I held research fellowships at the University of Sorbonne (the Fritz Thyssen Foundation), the Warburg Institute (the A.W. Mellon Foundation), the University of Bonn (the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation) and the University of Cambridge (the British Academy and the Royal Society).

Specialised in the history of medieval philosophy, I am particularly interested in theories pertaining to metaphysics and theories of the soul in the 13th-16th centuries. One of the aims of my research consists in enlarging our knowledge of the Western thought by unearthing, editing and analysing previously unknown philosophical texts preserved in medieval manuscripts. Since 2011, my studies focus mainly on the reception of Proclus’ metaphysics in the Latin West. On this topic I directed major research grants awarded by the Romanian National Council at the University “Babes-Bolyai” (2011-2016) and the French National Research Agency at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (2013-2017). At University College Dublin, I direct an ERC Consolidator Grant project (2018-2023) on Neoplatonism and Abrahamic Traditions. Its aim is to build upon the preliminary achievements of the previous projects, to deepen and integrate them into a much wider and systematic investigation of the Neoplatonic legacy in which the Western tradition is only a part of a global history of knowledge. For my work, I was awarded the Friederich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2018).

Ribeyrol

Charlotte Ribeyrol
Affiliation: University of Oxford, UK

Keywords: Victorian literature, Victorian painting, reception studies, colour, pigments, dyes

Webpage

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Full profile:

Charlotte Ribeyrol is Associate Professor at the Sorbonne in Paris and a Junior Member of the Institut Universitaire de France. Her main field of research is the reception of the colours of the past in Victorian painting and literature. Her monograph on the Hellenism of Swinburne, Pater and Symonds entitled “Etrangeté, passion, couleur”, L’hellénisme de Swinburne, Pater et Symonds came out in 2013 and she has since co-edited two special issues on the subject of paganism in international peer-reviewed journals:  Antique bodies in Nineteenth Century British Literature and Culture (with C. Bertonèche) Miranda, n°11, 2015 and Late Victorian Paganism (with C. Murray) Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens (2015). She also published in The Journal of Victorian Culture and contributed to the edited volume Pater the Classicist (OUP, 2017). In 2014-2016 she co-directed a major interdisciplinary project on chromatic materiality (POLYRE, IDEX Sorbonne Universités), which led to the publication of a collection of essays entitled The Colours of the Past in Victorian England (Peterlang, Oxford, 2016).  She then held a Marie Curie Fellowship at Trinity College, Oxford (2016-2018) as part of her new project on the colours of William Burges’s Great Bookcase.